Give me a break. Just get a phone "with Google" and use the pure Google experience and it's a breeze. All of this spinning and complaining about what OEMs are doing to an open source OS is like complaining about the DIY boxcar racer you bought and put together turned out like shit. (and you want your money back.)
This is not the case. I have a Samsung Moment "with Google". The stock Android it ships with comes with unremovable apps (and unremovable game demos), a half-baked navigation app, a terrible voice search replacement, unkillable background services that count how many times you open the keyboard. It's also got a totally broken radio driver that violated FCC 911 regulations for over a year (google it if you care), and has been abandoned at 2.1 officially 10 months from release since it's no longer in Samsung's profit interests to maintain a terrible device that Sprint pulled from their product line. The only way the phone is remotely enjoyable is with custom ROMs. I bought it with 1.5 and accepted a sub-par experience because of Samsung's publicly stated promise that it would get 2.1 quickly, it took several months before an official 2.1 update was released and nearly another year before their radio issues were resolved.
The "with Google" branding meaning nothing in terms of actual phone experience, and Samsung isn't the only vendor at fault here. After my experience, and dozens of similar accounts like this blog post, I don't recommend anyone buy an Android phone that isn't a "by Google", like the Nexus line, and even then, only if they have some strong objection to getting the iPhone, which I would recommend over any current Android device.
I really, really, really wanted to like Android, but you can damn-near put an 18 month countdown on the majority of the Android phones before the manufacturer abandons it and you're stuck using XDA developers or the like for updates, patches and improvements, or just to fix the stock crap they ship. On a 24 month contract cycle, that's just unacceptable.
"I really, really, really wanted to like Android, but you can damn-near put an 18 month countdown on the majority of the Android phones before the manufacturer abandons it and you're stuck using XDA developers or the like for updates, patches and improvements, or just to fix the stock crap they ship. On a 24 month contract cycle, that's just unacceptable."
Somewhat broad generalization ahead...
About once a year, Apple comes out with ONE new phone, an iPhone. If the phone is bad, Apple goes out of business. Apple bets the company every year on that new iPhone, and to make that a reasonable bet, they spend tons and tons of marketing on design, engineering, quality, and customer support. Apples knows a bad iPhone makes WSJ / New York Times front pages. Apple knows that to make a bad iPhone loses them iPad, iPod, Macbook,... customers.
And so ... by and large, Apple does not make bad iPhones.
In contrast
Four times a year, each, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Kyocera, Huawei, Sony, and others, come out with a new Android phone. This phone is one of many many products made by each of these companies. The success or failure of any of these phones means almost nothing to the company. And so, the product development and rollout of any of these phones is not a bet-the-company gamble. Accordingly, very little effort is made on design, engineering, and customer support. None of these companies have terribly loyal customers, most seem to buy a given phone based on carrier affiliation, or based on costs. Losing a customer here is bad, but does not carry the long term cost as losing a customer at Apple does.
And so there is very little incentive to make anything but competitive (in all the wrong meanings) phones here. There is a race to the bottom mentality going on.
"We think the phone we make is good, at least as good as the phone they make. Let's get some more marketing dollars from our partners for it and we will all be happy"
"The success or failure of any of these phones means almost nothing to the company. And so, the product development and rollout of any of these phones is not a bet-the-company gamble. Accordingly, very little effort is made on design, engineering, and customer support. None of these companies have terribly loyal customers, most seem to buy a given phone based on carrier affiliation, or based on costs."
In the long run, Google needs to do something about this, or face it doing severe damage to the image of their platform.
Many years ago, I took a look at the Apple iPod website, and looked at the models. The breakdown was simple. iPod shuffle, iPod Mini, iPod. You could see one page with all prices for all sizes (two sizes for each model), and then you just had to pick a colour and you were good.
I then went to look at Creative's website, and looked through their list of products. They had 16 separate models, many of which were very subtle variations (e.g. the 316 vs. the 316z). There was no breakdown page that would show you the differences or help you decide. Some of them had LCD screens, some of them played WMA, some of them had more space, some came in multiple colours, but you didn't know which had what or what it cost until you clicked on the page. Making a completely informed decision would take hours of clicking links, making notes, hitting the back button, and then clicking the next link.
I marvelled that not only was Creative competing against Apple, they were competing against themselves. They produced 16 different models, which requires 16 different manufacturing processes, 16 different packagings, 16 different manuals (each in a variety of languages), 16 different QA processes.
The same thing is happening here. Manufacturers are largely unwilling to challenge Apple in the high-end of the market (where the Galaxy S, Nexus S, iPhone 4, etc. all live), so they work in the smaller end. The lower prices mean lower margins and lesser quality parts. This also leads to less testing and QA, meaning a lower quality finished product.
As a result of these lower margins, they need to sell more phones, which means producing more models of phones and shortening the lifetimes of the phones in order to encourage people to turn them over faster. It's becoming a race to the bottom.
People compare Android and iOS to Windows and Mac, but it feels like the better comparison is Mac vs. PC hardware, not software. Apple makes very few models of computer (Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, iMac, Mac Pro), which they refresh lately. There are lots of variations, but you have four base models which are simple to understand. In comparison, if you go to Dell's website, there are a dozen models you can buy, each with subtle variations, and even with different prices depending on which business unit you buy from. Other PC manufacturers all do the same thing, and because they don't control the software they ship (other than crapware), they can only really differentiate on price.
It's become a race to the bottom, trying to slash costs and increase volumes at the same time, and PC manufacturers have realized that they're fighting over a huge chunk of the market and leaving Apple to actually make the profits. Android certainly has the potential to surpass Apple in market share, but they're going to be fighting over a much smaller chunk of profits, fragmenting their efforts over multiple products and competing against other manufacturers' multiple products.
Apple is one of the few companies in the world that does both software and hardware in a competent and timely fashion. If Sony / HTC / Samsung had as much software roots as Apple I believe we would see Android handsets that actually offered credible alternatives rather than being showcases for their hardware and physical design departments. Then again I guess shipping Android phones amounts to admitting that you cant do the whole stack. I really commend HP for trying to be the other company that does the whole stack.
Apple is great at understanding a customer's user experience. They are making the most profit per handset, too. Making a couple of bucks via bloatware might be driving unprofitability.
Certainly the experience is inconsistent and something I'm willing to accept. Considering the amount of experimentation on implementation and the rapidly changing OS, I will tolerate bad eggs to spoil the bunches. The problem is not with the software but with how Google has handled it's branding of Android and the "preferred" experience it associates with it. "with Google" was suppose to solve this problem, but as you point out there are still issues and loopholes.
I bought the MyTouch3G (2nd Android phone ever), the G2, the Nexus S and recently the Galaxy Tab. Overall, I'm very happy with the experience of each of these phones. There are other phones out there that have great experiences as well. As a consumer, I will research these purchases which matter and will pay with my time to get exactly what I want. If you want to, instead, pay for one company to handle quality end-to-end for you, then you will pay for that, too.
For me, the pluses in Android outweigh the (few) minuses (that remain).
For anyone else, it's great that they have the choice to make. :)
I glossed over it a bit, but one of my points was that I thought I had done due diligence in researching the product before buying. I had compared specifications, Samsung hadn't fumbled any phones this badly before, it was a "with Google" product, they were pretty consistently communicating to their customers about coming updates, Sprint was pushing it pretty equally to the HTC Hero (and Sprint's contract came in slightly cheaper than AT&Ts), the only complaints that had surfaced on forums were mostly DOA devices, etc. All information available pointed to it being a pretty good decision at the time.
If years of market research prowess fails me and I consistently see similar stories crop up every month or two where other technically inclined people regret purchasing some other Android device, it says to me that I didn't simply get a lemon or make a huge mistake in my decision making but the market itself has a problem, whatever issues and loopholes allowed it before have remained unfixed. Since the price difference between iPhones and top end Android phones are basically the same ($100 variance or so on a >$2k total cost...big deal), and that I can mindlessly buy whatever the next iPhone release will be and have pretty good assurance Apple has my back, I'm completely unwilling to waste time researching Android devices and still possibly get bit in the ass for my efforts.
LOL, that is a terrible analogy. If I bought and built a boxcar and I did it wrong then yes my fault, I'm not building the phone, the manufacturer is, so as a consumer I can expect a certain level of quality.
Most consumers don't know the difference between Google-made Android phones and the others. You're missing the core point which is that the Android platform is fragmented and regular people are being given a phone full of advertising and apps built for up selling.
Regardless, the intention of my point was that manufacturers were given "blueprints" and "tools" and they built a shitty product. Even though Android is Google's product, the end result is not and to point fingers at Android is wrong. Is it the fault of Google if people are using the tools improperly? If anything, Google should've better managed the Android trademark so as to not associate their toolbox/blueprints with sub-par implementations.
Give me a break. Just get a phone "with Google" and use the pure Google experience and it's a breeze. All of this spinning and complaining about what OEMs are doing to an open source OS is like complaining about the DIY boxcar racer you bought and put together turned out like shit. (and you want your money back.)